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I?ve owned the Yamaha drive for about a year now and its been faultless. I bought it because of the price and specification, not the brand. I?ve never had a Yamaha computer product before and have been pleased at the quality, reliability and speed of the component. The drive is a 16x write, 10x re-write and 40x read CD-RW drive. Unlike some higher speed drives, it will reliably write at 16x for the majority of the burn cycle. As the other reviewer notes, the drive is a little on the noisy side. Part of the noise comes from the mountings; if you screw the drive in well, the noise disappears. The second problem with noise comes from some brands of CD-R. I?ve found that TDK media tends to make a whirring noise in the drive. I?ve since stopped buying that brand and prefer to use Memorex which are silent. The drive has been put to good use, backing up my data, photos and music collection. It has written tens of CD?s without any coasters. The burn proof technology works well and compared to my old 2x drive, it works very quickly. The burner supports DAO (Disc At Once) so can write whole music CD?s in one go without the annoying 2 second gap between tracks. The tray has a nicely damped mechanism which is smooth in operation unlike some drives which clunk and crash as they open and close. In summary, I?d recommend the drive to anyone looking for a cheap CD-RW drive.

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I`ve had my CD writer for around three months now, and if I listened to some warnings I feel I would ha-ve been put off buying it. However I have to say that since I have bought it I have not had any trouble at all with it, and have found it to be far better than many other CD Writers that I have experienced. Parti-cularly the quality of the recording, which allows CDs to be read in a particularly poor quality portable CD player - something which no other drive has ever managed to do! So what about these problems? Well I tried out looking at the CD Information on a disk, and first time it comes up fine. You close the program, and re-open it. Then it tells you your disc is corrupt. However, I was not deterred - so I ejected the disc, and then put it back in. The CD Information is then correct, ama-zing. I then wrote very successfully to the disc! So I can conclude that it probably is a small software pro-blem. It`s interesting really because I`m sure you are all using Windows?! Well there are quite a lot of software problems with that... Anyway, about the drive. It works really really well. It`s very quick - I make sure that I run it at the rated speed of the disc I`m using before I burn (12x for the discs I`ve got). Sometimes it’s not too quiet in my opinion – on average, quieter than other CD drive. It doesn’t have burnproof, but 8 good Mb buffer. It in-stalled fantastically smoothly too. Buy it...or buy Yamaha`s new drive due out now.

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This is Yamaha's IDE 16 times write, 10 times rewrite, and 40 speed read drive. It also does DAE (extracting audio tracks off CDs) at 40 speed. It doesn't have BURN proof technology, but it has an 8MB buffer, and some fancy gizmos to make it more reliable. I have an Athlon 700 with an IBM ATA 100 drive, and 256MB RAM so I can't vouch that it works as well on lower spec machines, but. . This drive is fast, even on Fuji 8 speed media it burns a full CD in just under 5 minutes. In the box you get Adaptec Easy CD Writer Version 4, 1 16X rated CDR, and one high speed CDRW. When you put in a CD (any CD) it's noisy, very noisy, but what speed though! As I said it burns a CD in under 5 minutes. The audio extraction is phenominally fast, even encoding to mp3 at the same time only makes it a bit longer - I can take a CD and turn it into mp3s in under 5 minutes! So, good software, easy to install, and blindingly fast, but a bit noisy.